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Native support for pure Go actions #333

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@myitcv

Description

@myitcv

Following on from discussion in #243 (comment)

Describe the enhancement

Native support for pure Go actions.

Go is a great choice for actions for a number of reasons, including:

  • cross-platform
  • using Go modules via proxy.golang.org and sum.golang.org solves most/all (citation required) of the existing software dependency issues
  • fast and readily cache-able
  • ...

In a recent blog post I experimented with pure Go GitHub actions using a thin NodeJS wrapper. That experiment worked well; GitHub Actions have generous concurrency limits, fast startup times, and solid cross-platform runners.

However:

  • Go needs to be installed in every workflow using such Go actions
  • having to create a wrapper for each action is awkward
  • we are not relying on proxy.golang.org for resolution of the action itself

This issue is therefore a request that GitHub Actions add native support for Go actions, thereby solving all of the above problems (and possibly others).

Code Snippet

At the bottom of the blog post I sketched out what v1 of a pure Go solution might look like, from the user's perspective:

# .github/workflows/test.yml
# ...
    - name: Display a greeting
      uses: github.com/myitcv/myfirstgoaction@v1.0.0
      with:
        name: Helena

In practice this would mean, from the runner's perspective:

  • uses: directives reference main packages, so $package@$version (where $version is a full semver version)
  • creating a temporary Go module to reference the action
  • using proxy.golang.org for resolution
  • go run $package (which has the side effect of authenticating modules vs sum.golang.org and including all module version information in the resulting binary)

A disadvantage of this bare-bones v1 is that the first use of every action in a workflow results in cache miss: module or build cache and build caches start from cold. But that could easily be fixed in v2 with a simple internal GitHub service that cached and served pre-built cross-platform binaries for $package@$version. That would obviate the download and build time, replacing it with a very fast CDN-speed binary download parameterised by GOOS and GOARCH.

Additional information

n/a

cc @bryanmacfarlane @mvdan @rogpeppe

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